While there are certainly important points of continuity between the religious worlds of the Gilded Age and those of our own time, the analogy cannot be trusted to carry much in the way of analytical weight. We can begin to explore both its strengths and weaknesses if we descend into a damp and drafty late nineteenth-century Chicago basement.

Nine years in that subterranean space seemed more than long enough. Once, it was all that the saints gathered at Chicago's Trinity Swedish Evangelical Lutheran Church had been able to afford. But the congregation's fortunes were on the upswing. Founded by a small band of thirteen souls in 1883, the church counted just thirty-six communicants when Pastor Swen Sandahl arrived in 1886. Fresh off his first call, a five-year stint in Princeton, Illinois, the young Swede hit his stride in the big city. Within a year Trinity had outgrown the parsonage where it had been meeting and invested in the construction of a basement meeting space on the corner of Barry and Seminary streets, roughly a mile west of Lake Michigan on what was then the far north side. A proper church building would have to wait. But by the spring of 1896 it could wait no longer: Trinity now claimed some 800 members and was bursting at the seams of its longtime basement home. Hopeful about the future, the congregation opted to move forward with plans for a stunning $11,000 Gothic sanctuary atop its property. Every one of its 900 seats was full on June 20, 1897, as well-wishers from across Chicagoland joined the congregation in celebrating the dedication of its long-awaited building. “The exterior as well as the interior of the church can well be compared with any other large church in America,” boasted the editors of Chicago's leading Swedish newspaper, the Svenska Tribunen, later that same week.Footnote ¹

No one present that day could have imagined that, a little over a century on, Trinity's beloved sanctuary would be transformed into luxury condominiums. But sure enough, that is exactly what happened. In 2002 a real estate developer bought the building, which had most recently been home to a struggling Pentecostal congregation, and agreed not to change the exterior. But he chopped the interior into five condos, the largest of which is a gargantuan 4,411 square feet. He left some of the building's original features intact, including the Murano glass chandeliers that hang in what is now a living room and the fourth-floor bell tower, complete with its bell. Others he repurposed. The church's pews were turned into dining chairs and its front door into a double-bowl vanity for one of the luxury bathrooms. In 2017 one of the units at “Cathedral Place” went back on the market with a price tag fit for a robber baron: $1,569,000.Footnote ²

Trinity's latter-day fate is anything but unique. We live in an era of church closures and parish consolidations, an age of anxiety for religious institutions of nearly every kind. When the National Council of Churches, an ecumenical Protestant organization with roots in the Progressive Era, announced in 2013 that it was shutting down its historic New York City headquarters and relocating all remaining staff to a much smaller District of Columbia office, it became one more sign and symbol of just how far the storied Protestant mainline has fallen. But in recent years the demographers have been bearers of bad news for American Catholics and evangelicals as well. The Pew Research Center's 2014 Religious Landscape Study underscored that their respective shares of the nation's religious market are also diminishing, even as it revealed an unprecedented spike in the percentage of Americans who are religiously unaffiliated. These “nones” jumped from 16.1 percent of the population in 2007 to fully 22.8 percent by 2014.Footnote ³ The fact that the unaffiliated skew young—their median age of thirty-six is a full decade younger than that of the general population—has religious leaders across the lines of denomination and tradition worried about the future. As one Reform rabbi told Religion News Service: “we are on the verge of losing a whole generation.”Footnote ⁴

Amid all this contemporary talk of decline, it would be easy to imagine the more expansive era in which Trinity was built as one of supreme confidence. But in fact the clergy of the Gilded Age were no less intensely anxious about the future of their institutions.Footnote ⁵ A shaken religious establishment was as characteristic of that time as it is of our own. Even as the Swedes at Trinity were preparing to move into their new building, one of their fellow Chicagoans, the Reverend Henry F. Perry—a student at the University of Chicago and a Baptist minister in one of the city's most upscale South Side neighborhoods—was sending this letter out to workingmen and union leaders across the country:

Perry was hardly the first to conduct such a survey. They became commonplace starting in the mid-1880s, when clergy across the country became possessed by a fear that churches were losing their foothold among the masses and, in particular, among respectable, white workingmen. Their sense of an imminent crisis had a dubious connection to realities on the ground. Rates of urban church attendance were in fact on the rise, and the American faithful had been overwhelmingly female since at least the seventeenth century.Footnote ⁶ But the big picture did not get in the way of ample fretting when the results of small-scale surveys from places like Montclair, New Jersey, Columbus, Ohio, and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, showed a lack of laborers in the pews.Footnote ⁷ By the early 1890s these anxieties were so pervasive on both sides of the Atlantic that they dominated the program at international gatherings of clergy.Footnote ⁸

So, when in 1899 Reverend Perry published the results of his survey in the American Journal of Sociology under the title, “The Workingman's Alienation from the Church,” he could be confident that they would not just gather dust on a shelf. He had received responses from the most prominent of union leaders, including Samuel Gompers of the American Federation of Labor (AFL), who related, “My associates have come to look upon the church and the ministry as the apologists and defenders of the wrong committed against the interests of the people, simply because the perpetrators are possessors of wealth … whose real God is the almighty dollar.” But Perry was most interested in what the more ordinary, non-churchgoing worker had to say for himself. “We should here, if anywhere, strike the root of the matter,” he declared. One such workingman wrote, “The church has, as an organized body, no sympathy with the masses. It is a sort of fashionable club where the rich are entertained and amused, and where most of the ministers are muzzled by their masters and dare not preach the gospel of the carpenter of Nazareth.” These same notes resonated across a number of the responses Perry quoted. “Why should I wish to go into a $200,000 church and listen to a minister who gets perhaps $3,000 a year for preaching one sermon a week, denouncing the poor railroad man who is striking that his brother-worker should have $2 per day?” one man asked, even as another insisted, “Jesus Christ is with us outside the church and we shall prevail with God.” Perry was largely disdainful of their political and theological instincts. He brought the article to a haughty close, writing, “The Jesus who is applauded by the average workingman is a minimized Jesus Christ, a fictitious person, not the Christ of the gospels.” And yet his condescension did not matter as much as his findings, which only added fuel to a growing fire of clerical anxiety.Footnote ⁹

The question arises, of course: if the “crisis” was significantly a figment of the clergy's imagination, then who set the fire in the first place? The answer, without a doubt, is working people, who in the decades following the Civil War instigated and sustained a fierce fight over the morality of industrial capitalism, which set the religious establishment of the period back on its heels. While workers’ moral arguments long fell on deaf ears, their threats to abandon religious institutions that failed to support organized labor eventually caught the clergy's attention. Only too happy to foster and feed the building sense of crisis, they would, before all was said and done, achieve a sea change in the churches’ posture toward unions.Footnote ¹⁰ While there are certainly any number of important similarities between the first Gilded Age and our own, this history of dogged working-class religious activism suggests a fundamental difference: namely, that the ordinary believers of the late nineteenth century were not inclined to give economic inequality their “amen.”

Take for example Andrew Cameron, the founding editor of the Workingman's Advocate, one of the nation's leading postbellum labor newspapers. Cameron grew up in the 1830s and 1840s in the Scottish border town of Berwick-upon-Tweed, where he may well have been exposed to Chartist agitation against the established church's power and privilege. In the words of one quill dresser–turned–Chartist lay preacher:

As Cameron made his way on the other side of the ocean, he carried on this tradition of working-class religious critique. It was not hard to find opportunities. Throughout the labor movement's early years, American churches, including both Protestant and Catholic, presented a nearly united front of opposition. The Reverend David Swing is remembered as a pioneering liberal in debates about theology and biblical interpretation, but even he did not deviate from the vast consensus of his peers when it came to “the labor question.” From Swing's vantage the issue seemed cut and dry: “The conflict between classes in the cities of our country is not a conflict between labor and capital, but between successful and unsuccessful lives.”Footnote ¹²

Cameron was never shy about confronting his religious betters. Consider his response when, in the autumn of 1867, he picked up a copy of the Congregationalist Advance and found an editorial by a prominent minister that read in part, “For several years past preconcerted and systematic efforts have been made by demagogues and so-called friends of American mechanics and laboring men, to cause them to be dissatisfied and discontented with the position to which the Supreme Ruler of all has assigned them in this world.”Footnote ¹³ Cameron was incensed. Still smarting from the fact that so few clergy had rallied to the workers’ side during a recent, ill-fated push for an eight-hour day, he lashed out, writing in the Workingman's Advocate, “We have some respect for the highwayman, who revealing his true character, demands ‘Your money or your life’; we have none for the individual who, presuming on the sanctity of his office, prostitutes the function of a minister of the gospel to … sustain a villainy against which the vengeance of heaven is assured.” In Cameron's estimation the problem was much bigger than one problematic divine. He went on, “It is this superlative cant and truckling to mammon which has brought the modern church into disrepute, and caused the working classes to look upon its teachings with suspicion and distrust.”Footnote ¹⁴ Already in 1867, Cameron and others like him were beginning to make their case that, in facing off against labor, the church was sowing the wind; surely the whirlwind of working-class disenchantment was not far behind.

The pressure only built in the decades that followed, as the varieties of working-class resistance multiplied. While Cameron always looked askance at radicalism, some socialists and anarchists mounted religious attacks of their own. In 1885, while leading clergy were busy participating in the dedication of a new Board of Trade building in downtown Chicago, Albert Parsons riled a massive crowd of protestors with a subversive interpretation of what was happening. He cried aloud, “A temple was being dedicated to the god of mammon, to be devoted exclusively to the robbery, the plunder, and the destruction of the people. When the cornerstone was laid Bishop Cheney was there to baptize it. What a truthful follower that man must be of the tramp Nazarene Jesus.” The crowd erupted into laughter and then cheered when Parsons added, “who scourged the thieves from the board of trade of Jerusalem.”Footnote ¹⁵ Just over two years later, Parsons was executed by the state for his participation in the notorious Haymarket Riot of 1886, but his indomitable widow, Lucy Parsons, kept the faith. At a Knights of Labor local assembly meeting she denounced “the Christian civilization of Chicago, [which] permits the heart's blood of your children to be quaffed in the wine cups of the labor robbers.”Footnote ¹⁶ Throughout the Knights’ short-lived 1880s heyday, their flagship, eponymously named, widely read newspaper was a major vehicle for the dissemination of working-class religious criticism. One editorial captured the spirit of much of the commentary, posing a pointed rhetorical question: “Have the working classes fallen away from the churches or have the churches fallen away from the working classes?”Footnote ¹⁷

In the 1890s some workers did fall away from persistently anti-labor churches, often making as much noise as they possibly could on the way out the door. Consider the drama that unfolded across Chicagoland during the Pullman strike and boycott of 1894. Remarkably, even in the wake of several decades of industrial conflict, the nation's religious institutions largely maintained their hard-and-fast stand against unions. Workers were tired of it. In the months before the strike broke out, working people from across the city came together to found a labor church, one of several that sprung up across the country during these years.Footnote ¹⁸ This development created quite a stir in the papers, but especially after the battle between George Pullman and his workers turned into a national affair, the focus of the public's attention shifted in that direction. Before all was said and done, many working-class Catholics stopped their subscriptions to the archdiocesan newspaper out of frustration with the editors’ refusal to side decisively with Eugene Debs's American Railway Union (ARU).Footnote ¹⁹ Such acts seemed mild when compared with what happened within the sanctuaries of Pullman town. In a Swedish Lutheran congregation tempers flared when the priest denounced the ARU; when he refused to recant, working-class parishioners denounced him as a “scab minister.”Footnote ²⁰ A similar backlash at the nearby First Christian Reformed Church prompted the divine presiding there to back off his criticisms of the strike.Footnote ²¹ Nowhere was working-class resistance more concerted than at Pullman Presbyterian Church: when the minister there railed against the strike, working people left in droves. Notably, all but a handful immediately reaffiliated with other congregations in the vicinity, making clear that they were not abandoning the larger church but rather this particular one, which had become too closely identified with capital.Footnote ²²

Gilded Age workers’ religious protests proved effective. By the turn of the century, as clerical anxiety about the loss of workingmen peaked, new possibilities came into view. In 1903 alone the Presbyterian Church founded a Department of Church and Labor, while the Congregational and Episcopal churches authorized commissions to investigate industrial problems. The Methodists established the Federation for Social Service in 1907, and soon thereafter endorsed a “Social Creed” that called, among other things, “for the abolition of child labor”; “for the suppression of the ‘sweating system’”; and “for a living wage in every industry.” The predecessor organization to the National Council of Churches, known as the Federal Council of Churches, ratified that creed shortly after its founding in 1908. Meanwhile, in 1910 the American Federation of Catholic Societies sent its first fraternal delegate to the AFL's national convention.

For working people who had been fighting to see such breakthroughs for a generation, these were heady times.Footnote ²³ We stand more than a hundred years removed from them, and while the social and economic teachings that were first elaborated in response to late nineteenth-century working-class activism remain on religious organizations’ books, they carry less and less weight outside of denominational headquarters. Well over 70 percent of the nation's population still identifies as religious, but less than 7 percent of private sector workers are unionized. We live in an era defined in no small part by working-class conservatism, which as historians have shown has a religious history all its own.Footnote ²⁴ Whether the 2016 election, with its surging populisms on both the right and the left, augurs something different on the horizon remains to be seen. The fact that Christian socialists are once more organizing in Methodist churches and penning editorials for major papers would certainly seem suggestive of new possibilities.Footnote ²⁵ And there can be little doubt that if the “nones” were to get organized and to pinpoint economic injustice as a major contributing factor to their disaffiliation, they would have no trouble finding an audience among the anxious religious leaders of today. But for the time being, it is hard to see anything today quite like the freewheeling, working-class-driven debates over the morality of capitalism that played out across the American religious landscape in the late nineteenth century. In that important sense, at least, ours is no new Gilded Age.